www-servers bangert@gentoo.org Varnish is an HTTP accelerator. An HTTP accelerator (often called Reverse Proxy) is an application that stores (caches) documents that have been requested over the HTTP protocol. Based on certain criteria the next client requesting the document is either given the cached document, or a "fresh" document requested from a backend server. The purpose of this is to minimize the requests going to the backend server(s) by serving the same document to potentially many users. The goal of Varnish is to be a very fast, stable and effective light-weight HTTP accelerator daemon, by using modern and effective technologies. Ease of managment and good documentation is also a main goal of the project since the lack of either one will render Varnish useless.